Races, Creatures, Monsters, And Spirits/Deities
Magical people, taming, alchemy, crafting, religion, and adventuring in Axioms
Races
Races in Axioms aren’t purely random only because I’d have to make an icon generator. I might get around to this later or make it part of a 4-5 month after release expansion. There’s roughly 28 right now. Races have a height, weight, mass, reach, caloric requirement per month, a list of food preferences, an ideal climate, and than racial attributes and aptitudes. Aptitudes are currently just magic potentials. Attributes aren’t really fleshed out yet.
I’ll probably end up with 7-14 attributes depending on granularity. Likely closer to 14 than 7. This will be basic stuff like strength and endurance and such as well as mental things. I might do some social versions but not to a high degree.
Both attributes and aptitudes matter primarily for characters spawn from populations but will also be relevant for fighting abilities. I’m considering if I want to impact crafting and knowledge racially. Probably not to a great degree. Races can interbreed and can be modified to subraces in various ways, mostly magical. Characters can be modified more extensively than populations probably.
Creatures
Creatures are a special category in Axioms that is way more townbuilding than strategy. Actually the system is derived from one I developed over 10 years ago when I was working on an indie MMO concept. Creatures provide not only food and cloth and labor but they can, especially magical ones, provide crafting ingredients. Alchemy, weapons and armor, enchanting. All that kinda stuff. The concept is something you’d be more likely to see in a LitRPG or a cultivation novel than even a typical fantasy city builder.
Creatures can also be tamed for both inclusion in armies as mounts or like wardogs but also for characters to use in various ways. Even using creatures as familiars and for intrigue type stuff. You can also use essense leeching to gives your soldiers attributes from creatures the same as you can from other populations. Or do something similar with characters.
Creatures can be found through province exploration as well as through other exploration activities like dungeoning or adventuring. I might save breeding and a few other things for the first magic focused expansion. I cut a lot of features to put aside for a sequel because they’d take more time and money to do. Like different realms/planes. But some mechanics are not core mechanics but would work for an expansion maybe every 4-6 months for a couple years before doing a sequel.
Monsters
Monsters are in some ways just a special class of creatures. Can only be controlled with magic, less common, more powerful, with weirder capabilities. Mostly come from dungeons/lairs or created by mad mages. They can’t be generally tamed, except maybe by extremely fancy building/artifact combos at high levels of magic/tech. Something you might not be able to do in every world gen. Monsters can be leeched but might also provide cores as they do in some fantasy stories. There might be some sort of “uses monsters for stuff therefore is evil” association as well.
Spirits/Superorganisms
These entities are covered lightly in the Axioms Alternate Playstyles post. These are more like characters than monsters and creatures. Great spirits or sentient forests or w/e can provide a gameplay change where you pact with them and act to fulfill their goals, which are usually bad for the rest of the world. If discovered other polities and states might put together coalitions to stop you, especially if you have become widespread. Think of something like the blight from wheel of time as an example.
Spirits are more likely to want to maintain a small domain vs superorganism that want to expand though this isn’t set in stone for all of them. Spirits and potentially things like Demons will offer pacts giving you personal boons while superorganisms are more active in the world and will support you with creatures and monsters and buffs within their domain.
Deities
There are a randomly generate set of primal deities with randomly chosen sets of conceptual domains. Fire, war, law or something. These will comprise at least one of each domain. Then you have gods worshipped by varieties or religions or populations which often conflict with primal deities. Each “concept” has a somewhat fixed pool of power so deities with the same domain are somewhat in conflict. Primal gods have a sort of fixed power while neo-deities if we call them that grow by worship. Primal gods can never be cast down, pending the sequel, but conflicting neo-deities can be defeated.
Deities can grant boons or cast curses but unlike spirits or even demons can’t directly manifest in the world. Deities are one of the elements with large additional systems and mechanics I set aside for a potential sequel if the game does well. Religion conflict is complex and I’m searching up a lost forum post where I discussed it.
As far as I know no game allows for the scope and variety of engagement in religious conflict that Axioms does. Even the civ 6 religious battles or w/e aren’t close. I think there is a god game I can’t remember who is semi close but that is the entire content of that game. SBtT2 and SoFG are elder god conquest simulators but I think they are still lacking. I recall wishing there was more going on when I played them. Plus they are somewhat impenetrable.
I’'ll do a post on distinctly religious conflict and mechanics and how that impacts deities and spirits when I can find my old writing on it.